51 Comments
Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Always entertaining to see how socialists think climate change is adequate justification for upending the global economy and governance, but not enough to build nuclear power plants.

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Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I understand why Europe and North America has to get its house in order, and I share your optimism that we can do it. But, as you note, the real problem now lies in Asia, especially China and India. With those countries committing to carbon neutrality in the 2050s to 2070s, and with the regular addition of new coal-fired electricity generators, how can we do enough to offset what they are doing? How can we convince them to speed up decarbonization? Especially when we are at logger-heads with China.

This is something I don't understand about the proponents of socialism here. How will their proposals help with China and India, and hence, how are they a solution to anything?

The more optimistic was is through technology improvements, as also noted by Noah. If we can break through and make non-carbon generation cheap enough, Asian countries will want to decarbonize. And if we can master techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere cheaply enough, we can contribute to global solutions, not just national or regional ones.

And yet, many progressives remain deeply suspicious of any technology-based attempts at solutions. I'm afraid that they still haven't taken climate change seriously.

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I know people who are firmly committed to the apocalyptic view (things will either get dramatically worse or dramatically better) and I'm convinced it's a question of psychology in which the facts are mostly irrelevant. Some people just have doomy personalities and whatever happens in the outside world gets refracted through that. Social media probably makes it worse since they now talk primarily to each other, not to a random selection of people in meatspace.

Articles like Noah's are useful for people who aren't quite that badly off, and want to see factual evidence when they try to decide whether the world is getting better, getting worse, or something more ambiguous. But the real doomsayers won't even process something like this piece.

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Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I think an interesting question is actually around social media and the ‘meta verse’ and how much of our feeling of unrest is tied into new and unprecedented forms of communication. How much has this just accelerated trends that would have already happened and how much is it a true historical turning point? For example, how much should we fear the ‘time of disinformation’?

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Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Being old enough to remember the 80s gives me a different perspective. In the 80s the big concern was global warming (it was global cooling in the 70s) ending the world by 2000, only way to prevent it was to go solar (nuclear was too dangerous) - I still remember middle school teachers giving us art and craft assignments about how we will deal with all this when the world is underwater.

Time has taught me that these apocalyptic visions are largely the result of the neurotic LCDs in society who need to constantly rationalize their anxiety.

Humanity has survived for billions of years, we have never had it better. What matters now (as always) is to use technology to mitigate risks on the horizon - e.g., Dutch dike technology to perimeter key coastal areas at risk of flooding from climate change in the next hundred or so years, go all-in on nuclear energy etc. - not constantly indulge the neurotics in their delusions.

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Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Taking the opportunity to do my usual recommendation to read The Wizard and The Prophet by Charles Mann...

Also, well done Noah! My lifetime spans a large proportion of the era you survey here. I was a young child in the 70s, but growing up in the Detroit area the combination of Cold War stress, segregation-related tension, industrial pollution, and economic doldrums (plus tornado drills!) was palpable even to kids. My father worked in the auto industry, and the conventional wisdom was that US cars were s*** and the Japanese were kicking our butts and would do so forever.

At some point during the 80s I realized that, huh, things weren't so bad anymore. During the 90s, I recall reading a dead-tree newspaper column by somebody like Charles Krauthammer marvelling at the amazingly quiescent state of the world (End of History and all that) and thinking, well, it's not THAT great! I can't remember what my younger self took umbrage at, but looking back, wow, spot on.

There was no epiphany about the ebb and flow of progress, despair, and muddling through. It has always taken me a while to understand that we have collectively taken a few steps forward. But it's been a consistent theme. Even now, when you choose to dig into a lot of these issues (I was able to do so during a research fellowship last year), you will often see little rays of hope. It's easier for me to stay open to this when I stay away from most media, mass and social. .

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Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

I find this article really funny given that there is an extreme likelihood of a Republican wave in this year's elections. The only question now is how large.

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Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Really Good Article! The same is here in Europe. Not as divided as the US but everywhere the mood that everything is getting worse...

So let`s see for example my Home Country Italy! There where the so called " Anni di Piombo" = Years of Lead... In this Years from 1969 to 1983 extremist Groups realized more than 14.000 attacks in Italy... Attacks from the far Left (Brigate Rosse) and much more the far Right... Overall this Attacks killed 374 people and wounded over 1170.

And now people are talking that everything ist worse than previous decades... It`s crazy...

Here is the Englisch Wikipedia Artikel for some quick Infos:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)

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I fucking love that song...

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Jan 28, 2022Liked by Noah Smith

Very well done

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I actually think the performative rage of social media helps to prevent actual rage on the streets. Much in the way video games kept teenagers off the streets and helped reduce street crime. If kids are awake at 2am now they are in the rooms gaming, not in the streets bored and looking for trouble. Social media, Twitter rage, what have you, makes people feel like they are doing something without having to mix up any kitchen sink Semtex.

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Re “America’s great strength is that we freak out about everything, thus bestirring ourselves to early action when other countries might have let problems fester too long. If all goes well, 20 years from now we’ll look back on the 2020s as when society started to become sane again and we started to rebuild after a decade of chaos and rage.”

I wish I could believe that were possible. It would be nice “if all goes well” and society started to become sane again —and I know you’re saying it could go either way — but I don’t share any of the optimism. None.

We’re up to our eyeballs in an uncontrolled pandemic which was most likely caused by a lab leak followed by a clumsy coverup— which (while a few are speculating about it) essentially no one is doing a thing about. We’re not talking about biosafety. We’re not talking about international oversight of viral research. We’re not discussing the type of really useless research that creates super-viruses supposedly for benevolent purposes.

These viruses can be made for a few hundred bucks, with the skills of a grad student. Sure, I remember the 80s, thinking the world might end in a nuclear armageddon, but these viruses, and accidents, are way more dangerous. Almost incalculably more so. There’s no one to exercise the equivalent restraint with a virus, to hold the equivalent of the nuclear football. We don’t need multiple people entering their codes before disaster is unleashed. We just need some sloppy lab workers and a slightly worse virus, and here we go again. Life as we know it could be over next time. That’s how important this is, and that’s how stupid we are being.

I don’t necessarily think it’s true that we Americans freak out early about things, really. We freak out about the wrong things, like the “coup” that really wasn’t a serious threat. It wasn’t even “almost a coup.” It was kind of a joke. A dangerous joke to be sure, enabled by the Capitol police opening the gates as it it was a party, but a joke.

Meanwhile: We’re a wealthy nation, but one of the last in the world to provide health care to our people. A pandemic killing a million of us hasn’t even bumped that up the agenda to be a serious topic of discussion. We are _never_ getting health care for all, if the short-sighted oligarchs have anything to say about it.

It’s not an early freakout, or a late freakout. It’s business as usual.

We’ve nudged our political system more and more toward one that rewards only stupid/shallow/compliant legislators voting how they’re told to vote on pre-written legislation created by special interests which they don’t bother to read, such that in a real crisis, ****we don’t even have anyone capable of responding****. Our last two presidents have been a narcissistic dimwitted buffoon and a literal dotard. Things are so bad that people like Amash and Gabbard — who actually wanted to serve the American people— simply gave up and left.

That “coup” was some made-for-TV (and probably, if I had to guess, pushed by various IC infiltrators) spectacle. And we Americans are pretty worked up about that— the guy with the Nazi shirt and the guy with the Viking horns, and the guy with his feet on the desk. But for the most part, it was grannies and good ol’ boys registering their displeasure about an election because our electoral process itself is so opaque and untrustworthy that Americans no longer believe in _it_, either.

I detested Trump and the stupidity for which he stood, but I also understand why a lot of people have suspicions about our elections. We need handwritten, hand-counted, publicly counted paper ballots— such as a real democracy might have.

Meanwhile this “coup” has riled the libs and it’s just going to be an excuse for both parties to clamp down on “domestic terrorists” just as 9/11 was an excuse to clamp down on foreign ones.

I see this country slowly sinking into irrelevance. Not complete irrelevance, since we still have resources and big weapons. But relative irrelevance. The US is becoming the “Donald Trump of nations”— dumb and bloviating, consuming a lot, in love with itself, not realizing what everyone else in the world thinks of it, boldly taking advantage of its own people, bleeding them dry. The rich will eventually retreat to locked compounds with their servants and let everything else go to ruin.

And crime — well, I’m pretty sure crime is down because we’re completely surveilled, not because times are good or people are content.

I see mainly bad things ahead, because we’re on a downward spiral caused by inept and deeply corrupt leadership, and there’s no mechanism by which people, even if they get very angry, can make the US change course. The parasitic elite who are milking the system will continue to milk it, conditions will get worse, and even if the people get angry, they’ve only got their handguns, while the rulers have drones and bombs and tanks.

It’s not looking too good.

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Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022

Thinking about it hard, I'd say that I'm in the techno-dystopia camp. I think the technology will pull through on climate, but not really start to register for another 20 years. My read on the consequences: we're in for like 60-80 years of *realllllly* bad times for the actually poor in the global south.

Those bad times will translate to into a lot of *significantly* destablized and failed polities there. Those failures will drive mass attempts at migration/refugee flight, which will push the rich in the developed world (and thus the governments) into extremely gross authoritarian behaviors and also result in things that we can't really wrap our brains around (like the heatwave deaths in "The Ministry for the Future" made real).

So, every*thing* will be amazing, but every*one* really, really, really, won't be.

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Jan 28, 2022·edited Jan 28, 2022

Says historian Peter Turchin at https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/america-in-november-2020-a-structural-demographic-view-from-alpha-centauri/

"As readers of this blog know, structural-demographic theorists distinguish between two causes of revolutions and civil wars: structural trends, which build slowly and are quite predictable, and much less predictable, or even unpredictable, triggering events. (...) Structural trends undermining social resilience in the United States have been building up for decades. It became clear to me 10 years ago (see my 2010 forecast at https://peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/the-science-behind-my-forecast-for-2020/) and has become obvious to most everybody in the last few years. These structural forces are: increasing popular immiseration (declining incomes, falling life expectancies, growing social pessimism and despair), elite overproduction and intra-elite conflict, and failing state (growing state debt and collapsing trust in state institutions). The Covid-19 pandemic put even more pressure on the system, especially exacerbating immiseration."

Also look for the graphs at https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019.pdf

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Right now I'm getting hope from the market price of renewable energy sources which seem to accelerating toward being able to replace a lot of carbon based sources. Also, the fact that the YIMBY's are starting to stand up to the NIMBY's. Dense city living is fun, great for your career, and much less energy intensive than rural and suburban living.

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All quite reasonable, but you overlook to possibilities. The first is a conventional war in Eastern Europe. The second is a Trumpist victory in November and then Trump returning to the WH in 24 through something like what Eastman advocated. I don't think the war is likely, but surely Trumpist victories are, and the consequences they bring are unfathomable.

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